Aceticon

I use both Steam with Proton (for Steam store games) and Lutris with Wine (for the rest, mainly GOG) and the rate of one-click-setup success in both is about the same (maybe slightly better for Steam), with Lutris with Wine being more easy to tweak for solving the problems for those games that won't just directly run, plus Lutris lets me do way much more configuration customizing, so for example all my games under Lutris run sandboxed with networking disabled by default.

Granted, I am a Techie so I can more easilly figure out how to tweak all those configuration options and how to track launch problems in the logs.

Maybe Steam with Proton has a slight advantage for non-Techies (or Techies who just don't have the patience to even try to tweak things when a game won't run and just give up on it and move on), but it's not really that amazing - I get the impression it's more of a problem of misinformation (people hear about Steam and Proton and how it's all great, so try it and stick with it, but they don't hear enough about Lutris and the Heroic Launcher so end up not even trying either of them): it looks a lot to me like an instance of the usual "open source vs commercial software" marketing problem.

Mind you, without Lutris (or, as others mentioned, the Heroic Launcher which is similar) with all the nice install scripts properly configuring Wine for the specific game being installed, trying to game on Linux by directly configuring Wine (+DXVK) would be as an experience bad as gaming on Linux was a decade ago.

PS: That said, using the GOG client on Linux is a hassle and best avoided. both Lutris and Heroic integrate with GOG, listing the games in your account and seamlessly downloading the installers when you chose to install a game.

The problem is that with Steam you only know if that works after you bought the game and only know if that works across machines if you upfront have two machines to test it in.

I mean, if you know upfront that it matters to you (which you might not until, say, your machine breaks and you happen to have no access to the Internet or Steam in your new machine yet, at with point you'll be thinking "I wish I checked") you can go through all the hassle of always thoroughly testing it within the refund period of that game, but at that point piracy is less of a hassle.

Meanwhile some of my GOG offline installers are so old that they have been used on 3 different machines (well, one was the same machine under Windows and under Linux) already.

Don't get me wrong - I use both Steam and GOG, my point is that saying that "Steam has DRM free games" is even worse than a half-truth and about as bollocks as saying that a shop selling TVs is selling "Quake game machines" - sure, people with the right skills can get Quake to run in some Smart TVs, but that's not how the store is selling them as, that's definitelly not supported by them and they won't refund you a Smart TV purchase as "not suitable for purpose" if that device fails to runs Quake.

Steam is as much de facto a seller of DRM-free games as a electric appliances store is a seller of quake games machines: some people with the right skills might get quake to work in some of the smart fridges or smart TVs they sell, but they're definitelly not made for it, definitelly not sold as supporting that feature and definitelly no support whatsoever is provided for that feature.

When you're making a purchasing decision on their store, Steam doesn't tell you upfront if the game has or not their DRM hence you cannot make an informed decision on that factor: Steam most definitelly do not want potential customers to select games on the basis or absence of DRM.

Also the install process of a game in a new machine with Steam is always via their store which can arbitrarily refuse you access to the games you supposedly bought (only according to Steam, you only "licensed" them) whilst with GOG once you downloaded the offline installer it's de facto yours (even in legal environments where such sales are not treated the same as sales of games in physical media - which are treated as owned). The copying over of a Steam game is a hack, which even without the Steam phone-home DRM might not work, for example, if the game won't run properly when certain registry keys created during install are not present.

Hence why I formated my comment as a question ;)

Wouldn't that just be a single vertical line?

His handlers aren't quite as stupid.

Big city mindset is something else altogether than that of the countryside or even small city: it's an environment that teaches people to have a very low threshold to endure shit from others, even the "nicest" people, because when you live surrounded by thousands of people 24/7 and have to cross paths with literally tens of thousands every day just by walking on the street, enduring shit from others will quickly end up with you getting swamped by crap.

Further, in my own experience (granted, mainly in European cities), the bigger the city the more the people there have a big city's very own special kind of grit. You can see this is even how pedestrians deal with traffic - the bigger the city the less people are willing to just wait for the signs to change and the more likely they are to just tell somebody blocking the way of other pedestrians to "either fucking move or fucking get out of the way".

Of the people I've known over the years the only ones with an even lower threshold for taking shit than me were New Yorkers.

It's the kind of action that in the current environment risks triggering a break-up of the US and it's pretty much a certainty that if that happens Trumpistan isn't going have any of the rich parts in it.

Both in Fascism and Socialism/Communism the State owns the companies, or at least controls them.

Meanwhile in Neoliberalism the companies (well, Money in general) sits above the State, which is how it differs from Fascism: in both systems common people are at the bottom of the pile and whilst in Fascism a few people control the State which sits above Money, in Neoliberalism a few people control most of the Money which sits above the State (which is supposedly controlled by The People through elections, but since it's subsidiary to Money that means that what The People control via the vote is only that which Money doesn't care about)

In Democracy people are supposed to be at the top of the pile, controlling the State through their vote, with the State in turn being above the rest, including Money.

TL;DR

QLC drives have fewer write-cycles than TLC and if their data is not refreshed periodically (which their controllers will automatically do when powered) the data in them gets corrupted faster.

In other words, under heavy write usage they will last less time and at the other end when used for long term storage of data, they need to be powered much more frequently merelly to refresh the stored states (by reading and writting back the data).

So moving to QLC in cloud application comes with mid and long terms costs in terms of power usage and, more importantly, drive end-of-life and replacement.

--

Quad Level Cell SSD technology stores 4 bits per cell - hence 16 levels - whilst TLC (Triple Level Cell) stores 3 bits - hence 8 levels - so the voltage difference between levels is half as much, and so is the margin between levels.

Everything deep down is analog, so the digital circuitry actually stores analog values on the cells at then reads them back and converts them to digital. When reading that analog value, the digital circuit has to decide to which digital value that analog value actual maps to, which it does by basically accepting any analog value within a certain range aroun the mathematically perfect value for that digital state.

(A simple example: in a 3.3V data line, when the I/O pin of a microcontroller reads the voltage it will decide for example that anything below 1.2V is a digital LOW (i.e. a zero), anything above 2.1V is a HIGH (a one) and anything in between is an erroneous value - i.e. no signal or a corrupted signal - this by the way is why if you make the line between a sender and a receiver digital chip too long, many meters, or change the signals in them too fast, hundreds of MHz+, without any special techniques to preserve signal integrity, the receiver will mainly read garbage)

So the more digital levels in a single cell the narrower the margin, the more likely that due to the natural decay over time of the stored signal or due cell damage from repeat writes, the analog value the digital circuitry reads from it be too far away from the stored digital level and be at best marked as erroneous or at worse be at a different level and thus yield a different digital value.

All this to say that QLC has less endurance (i.e. after fewer writes the damage to the cells from use causes that what is read is not the same value as what was written) and it also has less retention (i.e. if the cell is not powered, the signal decay will more quickly cause stored values to end up at a different level than when written).

Now, whilst for powered systems the retention problem is not much of an issue for cloud storage (when powered, the system automatically goes through each cell, reading its value and writting it back to refresh what's stored there back to the mathematically perfect analog value) with just a slightly higher consumption over time for data that's mainly read only (for flash memory, writting uses way more power than reading), the endurance problem is much worse for QLC because the cells will age twice as fast over TLC for data that is frequently written (wear-leveling exists to spreads this effect over all cells thus giving higher overall endurance, but wear-leveling is also in there for TLC so it does not improve the endurance of QLC).

"Let them eat cake!"

Unity has a store with a ton of useful user made libraries, frameworks and utilities most of which are generally not worth the time spent implementing it yourself when you can get the thing for something like 20 bucks.

Also, for gamedev shops which already have a lot of Unity experience in-house, it's probably worth it to stay with Unity, though Unity so frequently changes their engine is profound ways, that existing Unity experience is less valuable than otherwise.

That's mainly it.